"NY" wrote in message
...
"Mike Clarke" wrote in message
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Ours comes on and stays on 24/7 if the power goes off for a second and
then comes back on (eg when the high-voltage feed to the village fails
*yet again*). I have to be alert to the problem, and turn the power to
the light off (turn off the lighting circuit MCB, since the lamp
appears to be hard-wired with no switch) and then turn it back on after
a delay of about 10 seconds. It is a confounded nuisance.

On the other hand, that is a useful feature for many people. I can
switch our front light off and on so as to "lock" it on while I do some
work on the car or just look for something in the boot. Similarly, I can
do the same with the garage light when I am cutting something outside,
in the evening. I specifically looked out for lights with that feature
as it is so useful. on the other hand, we very rarely suffer momentary
power failures and I can see how it would be a real nuisance there.
Maybe they should build in a 12 hour timer to cancel that feature
automatically.

Some versions overcome the problem of brief power failures by requiring
the light to be flipped off twice in quick succession to put them on
permanently.

With the sort of power cuts we had one night, even that wouldn't have
prevented accidental latching of the light. At most I think I counted a
run of four off-on in the course of about 5 seconds. Those automatic
power-restoring circuit breakers at the substation are a little *too*
enthusiastic: it would be better if there was a minimum off time of about
5 seconds to avoid false-triggering.

The Philips Hue system handles those power glitches fine,
keeps tract of the current state and restores to that And you
can specify that it does something different on the power
coming back too. And handles those movement sensor
lights much better too, trivial to override and have it on
or off as required for unusual situations but still do the
movement sensed actions as well. No need to play silly
buggers with light switches for the unusual events.

Not cheap, but very convenient to use.

Of course it would be even better if the power company did their job
properly and made sure that vegetation was not allowed to grow close to
the wires, so it could always be trimmed safely without needing a planned
power cut,

Ours do the trimming live, now planned power cuts for
that. The only planned power cuts are for pole replacement
or the very rare replacement of a transformer. New feed
cables to the houses are done live.

and certainly not so it get so close that it causes an unplanned one.

We don’t see much of that. We do sometimes see it happen in
a big storm which ends up with a branch falling on the 11KV
lines at the top of the poles and getting across the 240/415
lines further down the pole but that only happens every few
decades or so. All the new estates have underground power
so that doesn’t happen at all there.

A large fine to the power company for each and every power outage that a
customer experiences would be a good incentive.

Some of ours do get to pay compensation to the customers
for the time without power, but with some exceptions like
major grid failure like happened in South Australia recently,.

You tend to expect flaky power when you are in the middle of nowhere,
although when we lived in a tin hamlet of two farms and five cottages, I
don't think the power went off once in the year we lived there,

We do get that a bit with some farm supplys.
Not with the very small villages much tho.

whereas when we are in a village with about 500 people, about 5 miles from
two different market towns, we've had about 10 times when the power has
gone off and on in the six months we've lived here (if it happens
repeatedly on one day, I count that as a single event). The power company
had the cheek to suggest that anyone who had electronic equipment should
have it protected by UPS (an admission that power breaks were only to be
expected) and that anyone whose equipment got confused by repeated power
blips had faulty equipment. My router eventually got confused after an
evening of up-down-up-down (the router still logged on but it gave
"destination unavailable" when almost any web address was pinged - apart
from the ISP's own web site; DNS was working because the address was being
resolved to the correct IP address). That was cured by restoring the
router to its factory state - I need to remember to re-create the
port-forwarding rules so we can see our webcams from outside the LAN.


Its unusual to get one one unplanned outage a hear here.
And often no planned outage in a year too.